1). Totally agree here. the way transparency is handled sucks. I like to see some silk screen (or fab) layer while drawing tracks to keep orientation, but those layers always get pushed to the “bottom”. I have been fiddling with transparency settings Which you have to do manually! (NO transparency if you don’t change the settings yourself !!!), but if you set transparency, everything gets a bit vague and greyish and blend into each other. This can be partly remedied by upping the brightness / saturation at the same time, but it is a lot of fiddling with settings I do not want to fiddle with. Transparency can (and should!) be handled much better, but I’m not exactly sure how.
At the moment the “active” copper layer gets pulled to the front. I think it would be much better if the active copper layer is pushed to the bottom (or at least below it’s corresponding copper layer) and always be 100% opaque, and other layers painted over it with a high transparency. I would also like to be able to pin layers (such as silk screen or fab) to the front to have more reference points while laying tracks.
2). Gosh, clearance is grey now, had not noticed this before. Get used to it. I did notice that the grey clearance has no transparency. I think this is a bug / oversight.
3). I have KiCad V5.1.0 at the moment, and when I hover over a track and press [Del], it deletes several track segments, upto the nearest T-junction. If I click on a segment and then pres [Del] it deletes only the highlighted single segment. With ‘u’ and ‘i’ you can change the currently highlighted section (before deleting). This works pretty good for me.
4). Allowing DRC violations is something I do not feel comfortable with, but I understand the wish to be able to do it for simple homebrew PCB’s. A partial solution is to use: “Pcbnew / File / Board Setup / Design Rules / Tracks & Vias” and then add a few track widhts there. You can then increment or decrement from that list while laying tracks. This can only change the track width, not the clearance setting. Another partial solution is to edit the clearance settins of individual pads. I think it is a good idea if it were possible to change clearance settings (or ignore clearance) for individual track segments of a track. The clearance would then be set to whatever object the track bumps into. If you like this idea, then feel free to post a bug report/ feature request on launchpad.
Yet another solution is to edit indivividual pad settings. You can simply clik on a pad, press ‘e’ for edit and then move it a tiny bit (change X or Y position), make the pad narrower, make it oval or whatever is needed to satisfy DRC.